I was lucky enough to attend YOW! in Melbourne last week, here is a braindump of what I went to.
Day 1
Virtual Teams: Making Them Work
Interesting talk on Virtual Teams (Not remote teams). A Virtual Team is where (ideally) everyone is remote. Some takeaways:
Almost everyone in the room used Slack.
When there is an office and some people remote, if the people in the office all go in to a room to have a call with remote people, this will make the remote people feel even more remote as the people together will have a conversation between themselves that they can’t really be a part of.
Rethinking MVC with React Native & ReactiveCocoa
React Native is a React Framework for doing native looking mobile apps using javascript and React. It looks pretty awesome.
ReactiveCocoa is a React style framework for Cocoa UI, also looks pretty awesome.
Pragmatic Microservices: Whether, When and How to Migrate
This was an excellent talk. Randy went through lots of things around moving towards a microservice architecture, recommend watching this one back when the vids arrive.
Another really good talk, talked about how they added lots of custom logic and processing to their app without making it a mess.
Spoilers: Preprocessing data, hook points to allow specific extensions and validation.
Frugal Innovation and Scaffolding software
Really good feel good talk on innovation in Africa, when the video comes up make sure you watch it!
Thriving in a Stochastic World
Good talk for teams that try optimise for reliability in their process.
Day 2
Using Formal Methods to Eliminate Exploitable Bugs
Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On
Really Really good talk for anyone doing scrum, Slides are online but don’t make sense by themselves, watch out for the video.
Talks about the human-improvement side of this process, writing down what skills people think they have and what they’d like to improve on. Forming scrum teams based on the work that needs doing rather than trying to fit the work to the team.
Facebook’s Product Infrastructure
Talked about how facebook is just a giant hack and they like it that way.
Really entertaining talk on how easy it is to hack poorly made sites.
Deploying and Scaling Microservices
The Future of Software Engineering
Good talk about the practice of Software Engineering. Everyone talks about how Software engineering isn’t real engineering, but when you delve in to it it turns out it is.
Designing for Failure: Scaling Uber’s Backend by Breaking Everything
Interesting talk about failures that Uber has had and how their architecture ended up like it is.
